DWF is a leading global provider of integrated legal and business services. With expertise spanning eight key sectors, DWF delivers comprehensive solutions through its three main offerings: Legal Services, Legal Operations, and Business Services.
Industry: Legal
Location: UK
Size: Enterprise (1000+ employees)
DWF chief technology officer Jon Grainger discusses how legal CMS ShareDo is turbocharging the firm’s data journey — powering its ambitions as it enters the race to leverage AI in legal.
Picture your team substantively increasing the volume of casework they process each day. DWF’s motor recoveries practice was able to do just that, all within a week of going live with legal case management system (CMS) ShareDo. The global law firm is using the platform to replace legacy systems — and to help deliver on its business aspirations as it enters the artificial intelligence (AI) age.
“Our sweet spot is solving complex problems for our clients through our integrated legal and business services,” says Jon Grainger, chief technology officer at DWF. And so, the ability to produce high-quality data was an absolute must-have when choosing a new CMS — essential for generating high-quality client management information (MI), and leveraging machine learning (ML) and AI effectively.”
Having joined the legal sector seven years ago, John has observed a huge amount of frustration with the quality of MI, as well as the speed and reliability of legal systems — a growing compatibility drift when placed next to more modern capabilities. Compounded by high levels of M&A in the industry, this has spawned “impossibly dysfunctional sets of tech”, he says, and an ever-growing backlog of IT requests.
So, when it came to identifying a platform capable of managing all legal work types while being scalable and API-first, for Grainger the choice was obvious.
DWF went live with a highly automated and complex legal work type in April 2024, 11 months after kicking off the proof-of-concept. Previously, it took two years to get to a similar state with other implementations, and by comparison ShareDo has been an especially ambitious one, Grainger notes — delivered at lightspeed as far as legal business transformation goes.
“Speed is the KPI,” he says. With ShareDo, several of the processes the motor recoveries team spent a few minutes on per task now take mere seconds to complete— and trial bundling, which would take up to three hours per bundle, now takes around 20 minutes. Intuitive workflows are helping supervisors save up to 15 minutes per proceedings.
ShareDo’s accelerators for different work type configurations, forms and workflows help DWF develop its own processes at speed, achieving a majority of this work out-of-the-box. “We can change the rest as we need quite rapidly. Even more exciting is when we implement the platform in the same practice area but perhaps under a different jurisdiction, using our version of the accelerator will get us even closer to an 80-90% fit right out the gate.”
It’s this ability to swiftly adjust and reconfigure the system that Grainger finds most remarkable. In the early days of testing the platform, he recalls an incident he colloquially refers to as ‘clickgate’: “Someone rang me up to say that the build had five more clicks than the system they were currently on — a disaster! But only an hour later, I got another call telling me it had been fixed.”
It turned out that ShareDo was displaying all the substages of the process to reveal how the system worked end-to-end, but reconfigured it immediately after receiving feedback from the firm. “The ShareDo team know their product inside out, and the speed they work at is incredible. Our group went from saying there were too many clicks to being impressed with how quickly the change was made.”
Any new system implementation is likely to be treated with caution, but Grainger says: “I didn’t have to do the old ‘trust me’ routine. I simply had to point at the evidence — where we were getting to with ShareDo, how quickly we were making changes, high engagement levels and user feedback. I’ve never had a go-live where the users have approached me to tell me how great the system is.”
In large part, he attributes this to a strong sense of psychological safety — a matter of both parties prioritising getting things right the first time. “Nobody will remember a launch that was a few weeks late, but everybody will remember one that went too early. So, we took a bit longer on data migration than originally planned, but we course-corrected and the results were fantastic.”
This strategic partnership is essential for any kind of digital transformation.
Finally, what really sealed the deal for Grainger is that every matter in ShareDo is derived from a parent matter type — inheriting its core characteristics and forming a ‘family tree’ of matters arranged around different practices, jurisdictions and so on. This has a huge impact on data-sorting: “Many legal CMSs will not sort case and matter data from different practice areas, leaving it for further down the line. With the new system, our MI team has immediate visibility into other activity to which a matter relates.”
And ShareDo has many features to ensure consistent data capture and quality, he adds, pointing to its traffic-light system for when a particular user is inputting poor or incomplete data — a trigger for a possible intervention, whether that’s training or involving the firm’s master data management tool. The firm’s data can also be enriched with other datasets via an API.
DWF now aims to launch the platform across the business within the next 12-18 months. “As we roll out ShareDo globally, with every single practice area comes this new stream of lovely, curated data. This is helping us to build great firm-wide data, which is fundamental to everything we want to do down the road — the cornerstone for MI, AI and ML. With this new platform we have high-quality transactional data, and now we can apply it against our unstructured data, using a combination of ML and generative AI to start asking questions across the two.”
That’s the strategic advantage in adopting ShareDo, he believes — freeing up headspace from all the digital transformation, he can now focus on the next stage, while the firm’s lawyers can truly own their processes. In his view, above all, technology should not get in the way of users: “We should provide guardrails, of course, but the goal is to step to the side and enable those in the business to become masters of their own destiny.”